"He dreams of the day when the spell of the bestseller will be broken, making way for the reappearance of the talented reader, and for the terms of the moral contract between author and audience to be reconsidered." Enrique Vila-Matas

Friday, June 26, 2015

Love After Love

House of Waiting by Marina Tamar Budhos

The time
will come

when,
with elation

you will
greet yourself arriving

at your
own door, in your own mirror

and each
will smile at the other's welcome,

and say,
sit here. Eat.

You will
love again the stranger that was yourself.

Give
wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to
itself, the stranger who has loved you

all your
life, whom you ignored

for
another, who knows you by heart.

Take down
the love letters from the bookshelf,

the
photograph, the desperate notes,

peel your
own image from the mirror.

Sit.
Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

One could vacation for
years in the Caribbean without ever tapping its wealth. For all of its sad and
violent history, by which I mean the European destruction of its native peoples
and the subsequent scourges of the slave, sugar, and drug trades, the region, best
known in the U.S. for its reggae, cruise ships, and Club Med, boasts an
extraordinary number of fine, even world-class writers—novelists, poets,
philosophers, and historians like George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul,
Jean Rhys, Franz Fanon, José Martí, C.L.R. James, Paula Marshall, Aimé Césaire,
Roy Heath, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Condé,
Simone Schwarz-Bart, Beryl Gilroy, Velma Pollard, Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace,
Samuel Selvon, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rosario Ferré, Julia Alvarez, Patricia
Powell, Caryl Phillips, Edwidge Dandicat, and, of course, the 1992 Nobel
Laureate, Derek Walcott.

House of Waiting, set in the early 1950's in New York City and in pre-independence British
Guiana, tells the refreshingly unusual story of the tumultuous if finally
redemptive relationship and marriage between a Jewish Orthodox New Yorker named
Sarah Weissberg and an Indo-Caribbean man named Roland Singh who has fled his
greater family and its desperation in colonial Guiana to try to make a life for
himself in the U.S., only to return to his native land to take part in its long
struggle for independence.

Guiana or Guyana, meaning 'the
land of many waters', was first colonized by the Dutch in the early 1600's and
finally seized by the British in 1831 to where they imported thousands of slaves
from western Africa to work their highly profitable sugar plantations as a
means of meeting the ever-growing European demand for sweets. With the British abolition of slavery the
sugar industry collapsed, though it was eventually replaced by the mining and
distribution of the still more profitable resources of diamonds, bauxite, and
gold. While blacks suffered miserably under British rule, so too did the
sizeable community of East Indians or Arya
Hindavi (the People of Hind), recruited en masse from British India as indentured
laborers in the wake of the abolition of slavery to work on the failing sugar
plantations. While the sugar industry had all but completely collapsed by the
time in which this novel is set, it is against this background of colonial
greed and exploitation, that the bitter struggle for independence is being
waged when narrator and protagonist, Sarah Weissberg's husband, Roland Singh,
leaves her in New York to return to Guiana in order to join the radical PPP,
the People's Progressive Party, under the populist and charismatic leadership
of Cheddi Jagan.

Unfortunately, as history
would tell, the dream was very short-lived. When Jagan and his party won the
right to govern and quickly advocated a program for the radical redistribution
of the nation's wealth, entailing first and foremost the immediate seizure of
the highly exploitative sugar industry, the British government (in league with
the CIA) dispatched warships and 700 troops to overthrow the new government
under the bogus pretext that they were acting against "part of the
international communist conspiracy".

While simply learning
about this—about Guiana, about its Indian community, about its valiant,
ultimately successful struggle for independence from the British—would be
reason enough to read this short novel, the story itself, an intimate, deeply personal
one, makes it especially worthwhile. As you might have guessed, the novel ends
with the still-innocent, now pregnant Sarah traveling on her own to Guiana, to
Georgetown, to save her marriage and to finally discover the truth about her
husband's troubled, if significant past.

Marina Tamar Budhos, the daughter of an Indo-Guyanese father and a
Jewish American mother, was born in Queens, N.Y. Author, journalist, and
educator, she has written two novels, House
of Waiting and The Professor of Light.

George Ovitt and Peter Adam Nash

George Ovitt is the author of The Restoration of Perfection; The Snow Man, a collection of short stories, and Splitting the Difference, a collection of poems.
Peter Nash is the author of a recently completed novel called Parsimony, as well as of a biography on the life and times of the turn-of-the-century Jewish American sculptor, Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel. He can be reached at nashpeter@mac.com.